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Book Review—Anne Applebaum's Red Famine

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Book Review—Anne Applebaum's Red Famine BOOK REVIEW—ANNE APPLEBAUM’S RED FAMINE (2017) Frank Hordijk (UiT Culture and Social Sciences Library) Anne Elizabeth Applebaum. Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine. ISBN-13: 978–0–241–00380–0. London: Allen Lane, September 2017. Hardcover; 512 pages; RRP [recommended retail price]: £25.00.1 Written by Anne Applebaum, Red Famine is a detailed historical account of the famine of 1932–1933 which engulfed ‘Soviet Ukraine’ (Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic, 1919 [1922]–1936; Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic [UkrSSR], 1936–1991)—an event known as the ‘Holodomor’.2 The Holodomor is considered to be the second great famine since the inception of the ‘Soviet Union’ (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics [USSR], 1922–1991) and it cost millions of lives, with numbers ranging from 3 to 10 million.3 In comparison, the first great famine in ‘Soviet Russia’ (Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic [SFSR], 1917 [1922]–1991) claimed approximately 5 million lives in 1921–1922. That famine struck Russian parts of the Soviet Union the worst, but Ukraine suffered as well. The first famine became known to the world while it was unfolding and was then intercepted by international aid, while the Holodomor of 1932–1933 was covered up and virtually erased from the Soviet public memory. While the Holodomor narrative is relatively unknown to the Western public, it is not a new one. The British–US-American historian Robert Conquest4 published the first scholarly treatment of the Holodomor back in 1986 in a book entitled The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine. In 2004, the two British researchers Robert William Davies and Stephen G. Wheatcroft challenged Conquest on ‘intentionality’ and the death-toll with their study The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931–1933 (2009 [2004]).5 Applebaum’s recent book picks up on this contested memory of the Holodomor. She is mostly known for historical narratives such as Gulag: A History (2003), while also working as an outspoken columnist in The Washington Post and other US news outlets, where she frequently voices her opinions on world affairs, often on the situation in 1 Allen Lane (London) belongs to Penguin Random House—such as Anchor Books (New York) and Doubleday (New York). In addition to the Allen Lane 2017 hardcover edition, both a Doubleday 2017 hardcover edition and an Anchor Books 2018 paperback edition are available; among other reprint editions. Further, Applebaum’s Red Famine is also available in Norwegian: Rød sult: Stalins krig mot Ukraina, translated by Rune R. Moen, 2018 published by Cappelen Damm (Oslo). 2 The term ‘Holodomor’ roughly translates to ‘death by starvation’. According to Applebaum (2017: xxvi), it is derived from the Ukrainian words holod (hunger) and mor (extermination). 3 These numbers have been heavily debated, but the historical consensus seems to stabilize at 3.9 million (Applebaum 2017: 279–280). The politicalized versions of these numbers are often set at 7–10 million, probably to ‘outdo’ the 1941–1945 Holocaust. 4 [George] Robert [Acworth] Conquest (1917–2015) was known for his polemical and condemning historical books on the Soviet Union and was an adviser of both Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan on questions concerning the Soviet Union. 5 Read more about this in the Deń [The Day] article ‘How the West Interprets the Ukrainian Holodomor: Robert Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft vs. Robert Conquest’ (Kulchytsky 2015). Nordlit 42: Manufacturing Monsters, 2019. Digital object identifier: https://doi.org/10.7557/13.5021. © 2019 Frank Hordijk. This is an Open Access book review distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. Book Review—Anne Applebaum’s Red Famine (2017) Ukraine—while typically characterizing Ukraine as the ‘victim’ and Russia as the ‘aggressor’. This view is reflected in the preface of her new book: The Maidan revolution [sic] of 2014, Yanukovych’s decision to shoot at protesters [sic] and then flee the country, the Russian invasion and annexation of Crimea [sic], the Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine [sic] and the accompanying Russian propaganda campaign [sic] all unexpectedly put Ukraine at the centre of international politics while I was working on this book (Applebaum 2017: xxx; emphasis added). It was truly a timely publication in the year 2017, with a divided Ukraine still locked in something akin to civil war, Ukrainian acts of aggression towards Soviet monuments and the release of Bitter Harvest (2017), a Canadian–US-American film directed by George Mendeluk, which tells the tale of the Holodomor to a global audience. Furthermore, as exemplified by the above quotation, it seems that Applebaum’s narrative of the Ukraine–Russia conflict is synchronized with the Western mainstream media version of the event.6 While Applebaum presents Red Famine as an objective historical work, one should keep in mind her other role in the news media and think tanks where she often warns about ‘total war’ with Russia. While it is important to contextualize Red Famine within her political work, my goal is to focus on how the content of her newest book is presented. A look at the bibliography in Red Famine reveals that Applebaum consulted a vast amount of literature in English, Russian and Ukrainian. Applebaum notes that the wealth of available documentation ‘finally’ makes it ‘possible’ to tell ‘the complete story’ of the Holodomor. Well, in this case, perhaps it is better to name it the ‘almost complete US-conservative’s version’ of the event. Applebaum’s work is, after all, aligned with Canadian and Ukrainian research, to which the author acknowledges a great debt for supporting her work. She tells us that: “[…] Conquest’s Harvest of Sorrow (like this one) was written in collaboration with the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute” (Applebaum 2017: 336). This information should caution the reader of what strain of the Holodomor narrative we have before us. Applebaum explains that since the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the independence of Ukraine a lot of work has been done collecting oral history and memoirs in Ukraine. Quotations from such witness testimonies are used to great effect throughout the book and make a gruesome reading, but one should perhaps be slightly wary of relying too much on such sources as they are not always trustworthy and may be politically motivated or otherwise manipulated, as pointed out by the US-American– Canadian historian John-Paul Himka.7 However, Applebaum relies heavily on witness testimonies to ‘prove’ that the famine was deliberate. Perhaps the best examples of this 6 Oliver Boyd-Barrett did an extensive study of such narratives and balanced them with narratives from ‘Western’ ‘alternative media’ in his book Western Mainstream Media and the Ukraine Crisis: A Study in Conflict Propaganda (2017), which should be consulted if you are interested in a critique of the hegemonic ‘Western’ mass-media narrative of the conflict. 7 See John-Paul Himka’s review article ‘Encumbered Memory: The Ukrainian Famine of 1932–[19]33’ (2013). Himka is known for challenging the ‘mythologizing’ of Ukrainian history. About this, read his article ‘Interventions: Challenging the Myths of Twentieth-Century Ukrainian History’ (2012). It is worth noting that none of his works are considered in Applebaum’s here-reviewed book. 382 Frank Hordijk can be found in chapters eight–ten that deal with the alleged decisions made by the Soviet government to ‘initialize’ the famine. Applebaum’s book is divided into fifteen chapters, not including the preface, introduction and epilogue. It includes historical maps of Ukraine and includes a large number of documentary photographs. The introduction briefly tells of the various obstacles that hindered the formation of an independent Ukrainian state before 1917. In the first chapter, the narrative begins in 1917, the first year of the ‘Ukrainian Revolution’. In 1918, Ukraine became an independent state for a short period—interrupted by German, Polish and three Soviet invasions. The third Soviet invasion came in 1920, which temporarily ended any hopes for independence, but Ukraine would still enjoy some freedom for the next ten years, although part of the Soviet empire.8 In chapters one and two we learn about Ukraine’s struggle for independence and identity in the period leading up to the Holodomor and we are offered important background material for understanding the famine(s). This chapter introduces the important label ‘kulak’, one of the three peasant class categories devised by the Bolsheviks. Referring to a rich peasant who exploited others to work for them, it became increasingly political: “Very quickly, the kulaks became one of the most important Bolshevik scapegoats, the group blamed most often for the failure of Bolshevik agriculture and food distribution” (Applebaum 2017: 35). Red Famine rears its head in chapter three, were the first famine of 1921–1922 eventually forced a truce between the Red, the White and anarchist armies. Applebaum attributes this famine to ruthless policies of grain confiscations exacerbated by civil war, propaganda, hate speech—and bad weather. Unlike the Holodomor of 1932–1933, “[…] in 1921[–1922,] mass hunger was not kept a secret. More importantly, the regime tried to help the starving” (Applebaum 2017: 61). Fridtjof Nansen and Herbert Hoover were key actors in the international relief effort. Applebaum posits that the famine was used to quell Ukrainian rebels and subdue the church, but the extent of the famine frightened Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks, forcing them to temporarily halt the grain confiscations. The famine’s consequences were peasant uprisings and fear for loss of power and resulted in two new policies, Lenin’s ‘New Economic Policy’ (NEP) and ‘Ukrainization’. The latter meant that the Ukrainian language was finally legalized and standardized, after having been very restricted in pre-revolutionary Russia.
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